The Quality of American Life: Perceptions, Evaluations, and Satisfactions.

Abstract

benefits require a fundamental recasting of economic and sociopolitical structures lest permanent stagflation erode the impact of present and future allocations. Clearly, when social expenditures in the United States have increased from under $9,000 million in 1940 to over $200,000 million in 1973, and when total government spending exclusive of defense now absorbs roughly 32 percent of national income, it is obvious that further advances in require basic structural changes. Without these, further extension of the state will become counterproductive. Far from limiting himself to the decline of economic surplus, the author discusses a variety of other issues, such as changes in the stratification system, the weakening of political regimes and the emergence of an ethic of hedonistic consumerism, which are connected with the rise of the state. He shows, for example, that the format of conventional interest-group politics has been undermined by the state. While it is true that the claims and expectations rooted in a person's occupation remain central, they are now crisscrossed by contradictory or competing pulls that arise out of claims for benefits. It is much more difficult than in the past for a person to calculate rationally where his political interests lie. A person's linkage to the mode of production . . . is (now) based both on his occupation and on the institutions of social welfare (p. 83). This may help account for the decline of relatively stable class-based politics, and the increase of independent voters in recent decades, as well as for the strains in the functioning of electoral and parliamentary institutions in the recent period. Janowitz concludes with a series of observations on the need to increase a society's ability to deal with the problems he has outlined. Though somewhat vague in detail, one nevertheless gathers that he favors both large-scale planning efforts and increasing citizens' participation through self-regulation. Space does not allow me to even indicate the many areas in which I differ from Janowitz; for example, his definition of the state as any state that allocates least 8 to 1o percent of the gross national product to welfare (p. 2) seems inadequate, since this definition would make Kuwait and Albania into states. But my main object is to alert the reader that this work is indispensable for any social scientist concerned with our current predicaments, and especially for those among us who are committed to the idea of the system and yet have begun to realize that spending is not enough. LEwIs A. COSER State University of New York at Stony Brook